Tag: liberalism

Categories
Economics Society

[2505] Limits to wisdom of the crowd

Liberal Malaysians in general are happy to stress on the wisdom of the crowd. In a context where the government holds a condescending attitude towards the public and in times when information spreads faster before the government can act, it is an appealing point to subscribe to.

Travel around and try to talk politics among critical and liberal urbanites especially, and somebody in that circle will remind you that the public is not stupid. Whether it is an honest opinion or words tailored to appeal to the post-2008 crowd, even Prime Minister Najib Razak said the days of government knows best are over. That is an acknowledgement of the idea from the very institution that traditionally sits opposite of the liberal crowd in Malaysia.

In heated political discussions, it is easy to take the black-and-white approach and engage in hyperbole stating that the crowd or the public is always right. Put a liberal and a statist in the same room and the game is on.

The truth is more nuanced. The crowd can be brilliant at times, and utterly stupid at others. The validity of the idea depends on the situation at hand. The examples that strengthen and undermine the idea exist all around us if only we care to see.

The chaos at the KTM Komuter train station at KL Sentral on Thaipusam Day provides contradictory examples all at once.

The trains were late. The platform was full of impatient commuters. When the trains arrived 30 minutes late, those on the platform found the coaches were full. If that did not make things bad enough, everybody wanted to go Batu Caves. With the roads closed, the trains were the most convenient means of transportation for ordinary folks.

The adjective convenient, is of course only used in superlative terms. There is nothing convenient about the service provided by KTM Komuter. For those who depend on the service daily, every day is a battle to be won in the scrappiest of all manner. The least painful way to go through the day is to embark and disembark as quickly as possible. This was what the crowd did exactly on Thaipusam day at KL Sentral.

The crowd did it by ignoring one unrealistic policy introduced by KTM and the government: the ladies’ coach. The ladies’ coach is meant to address complaints about sexual harassment that have happened before. The intention is good. Yet as with any policy, there will always be sacrifices that need to be made and the ladies’ coach policy sacrifices efficiency.

It just takes too much time to choose coaches to start with. For those who travel together, like families, friends or lovers, separation on the train is a hassle. And at least in theory, because the ladies’ coach is meant only for women and children while everybody is free to board the other coaches, the other coaches will be filled up quickly while the ladies’ coach will be relatively empty. Its inaccessibility effectively reduces the capacity of the train. All that means slower embarking, slower disembarking, and longer waiting time on a crowded platform.

With an already lamentable train service and a spike in ridership, something has to give. The crowd throughout the system implicitly and collectively decided to ignore the ladies’ coach policy and treat all coaches as the same. In doing so, they immediately improved the train efficiency by themselves without relying on good-hearted bureaucrats and politicians holding public office, whom by the way do not ride the KTM Komuter train and are essentially divorced from the reality on the platform.

That is one point for spontaneous order arising from the wisdom of the crowd. In the ladies’ coach, nobody minded men boarding it because it solved a big problem painlessly while the KTM policy, if adhered to, only exacerbated the issue at hand. All they wanted to do was to get on the train and get to Batu Caves either as tourists or Hindu devotees.

At the other end of the spectrum is a thoughtless mob of sheep.

The sun was strong but it was on its way down. The visitors were now tired and weary. They began to head to the Batu Caves station so that they could get back to the city. In the station, the crowd packed up a small compound. Even as there was no more space to stand, more came in.

With nowhere to go and too many standing too close together, restlessness set it. Some was pushing and shoving, struggling to get into the train, which was characteristically late. Some were shouting and others were panicking, making the scene surreal. Instead of spontaneously finding the solution, they were clueless until they made a danger out of nothing.

KTM officials and the police were there to monitor and eventually address the situation, albeit poorly. Nevertheless, they did prevent the situation from turning worse.

The fact that it did not turn worse when it easily could have, and the fact that the situation did not need to be like that if there had been proper crowd management, highlight the limit of what a crowd is capable of.

The same contradictory lessons from the very bottom of society can be applied nationally too. The majority knows what corruption is when they see it. Given a chance at the ballot box, they will possibly do the necessary to address it, as they had done in 2008.

On the other extreme, the majority is happy to receive handouts from the government but does not realize that somebody has to pay for those handouts. Either higher debts or higher taxation, it will come sooner or later. The separation between cause and effect in public finance is so great that they cannot see what these handouts mean on a wider scale.

With the folly of economic populism coupled with a magnified replication of what happened at the Batu Caves station, the wisdom of the crowd will be harder to argue for. The wise mob of Greece resorted to sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails wanting more when there is no more, with only the few to reason their way through with less.

This is a piece of advice to those liberals referred to in the beginning. They who overly emphasize the wisdom of the crowd need a more nuanced view of the argument.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on February 26 2012.

Categories
History & heritage Society

[2432] The evolution of cleanliness, according to Farish Noor

It is always a pleasure to listen to what Farish Noor has to say. He is a kind of a hip academician that challenges and entertains the mind. He makes history subversive and so making it much more interesting that the dull official version sanctioned by the establishment. I like subversion, even if I myself am increasingly conforming to societal rules… for a libertarian, that is. Last weekend when he held his regular public lecture at the Central Market Annex was no different.

He has a hypothesis on the understanding of the concept cleanliness and its evolution since colonial times. I do not buy it outright because it is, well, too clean and too specific. If you have a certain set of events, you are likely to be able to accommodate a lot of themes if you are creative enough.

Farish wanted to tie that lecture with the Bersih movement. I thought that was all too convenient. It sounded as if he was working the problem backward rather than deriving it from the root. Given this, there has to be more than a theme to sew it all together cleanly and tightly.

Nevertheless, the hypothesis of his is interesting enough for me to have a think and to modify it so that to make it more general. I find the looser understanding of his hypothesis which I consider as the gradual inversion of top-down approach of governance into the organic one as a more convincing narrative.

The whole premise of the lecture was how the idea of cleanliness was originally state-centric. European colonial powers in Southeast Asia considered the tropical environment with some disgust. The tropical jungle with sweltering sun conjured insect-infested environment, always associated with diseases like malaria.

The colonial powers brought with them new ways of life, apparently more ordered and cleaner, free from the naturally dirty tropics.

These powers introduced systematic town planning and better sanitation in Southeast Asia. Farish showed a photograph or maybe a painting contrasting clean European-designed building painted white erected in Southeast Asia with wooden Malay homes built haphazardly with coconut trees growing here and there randomly. If I may exaggerate, cows roamed free in the Malay village. European colonial powers took the former as clean, and the later as dirty. Farish more than hinted the racial superiority European colonialists held against the native then.

He argued that the introduction of modern medicine through colonial state apparatus further strengthened the European notion of cleanliness. The scientific nature of modern understanding of medicine intertwined with European understanding of cleanliness. Traditional Southeast Asian medicine was looked down at due to its dependence on beliefs regardless of its efficacy (here was where I first disagreed with Farish’s lecture. While a lot of these kinds of medicine are effective, many more are based on grandmother’s belief and downright fraud). The colonial powers undertook upon themselves to apply modern understanding of medicine and hence cleanliness to clean up the colonies. Hence, the introduction of town planning, for instance.

For him, cleanliness is not confined only to physical cleanliness. He argued at the public lecture that the definition of cleanliness was more wholesome. It also includes moral and spiritual aspects. It is this definition that allowed him to tell a story of evolving definition of cleanliness. He defended his definition by highlighting that the local inhabitants’ understanding of the term cleanliness included moral and spiritual cleanliness: a soul or morality untainted by the bad intention or even touched by the devil so-to-speak. He cited various customs as a lemma to his larger point.

Farish believed the notion of cleanliness that the European colonialists brought to this part of the world was a facade to cover up the dirty business of colonialism. While the colonial towns and capitals were neat, the political and economic exploitations were ugly: tin mines, rubber plantations, the misery these activities brought to the immigrants, the wars and crime. Farish argued that even the introduction of health ordinances was done toward this end.

European racism somehow got into the picture, with the colonial masters inevitably associated all things dirty with the locals and that gave the impetus for the mission of civilizing humankind, or probably in Farish Noor’s parlance, making everything clean. Here is where the wholesome definition of cleanliness gets into the larger picture.

This all encompassing understanding of cleanliness gives one mandate to govern. I am better than you, and therefore I am the master. From mere racism, it was later translated into statism. The state was all knowing.

Fast-forward to post-colonial Malaysia, the racist connotation (racism among Malaysians notwithstanding) was gone but the statism prevailed.

This time around however, the common people subscribing to Islamic values saw the government was dirty, whatever those values were. It was a kind of nationalism that despised colonial legacy. In the 1970s, the university students saw the political elites and institutions as champagne drinking men living a Western lifestyle. These elites were not the god-fearing leaders that fit the idealized leaders these students dreamed for. The students were revolting against what they thought was impure political structure.

Farish believes this was the first seed that prodded civil society to assume the concept of cleanliness as theirs and turned it from state-centric to organic definition. From the state being clean and the ruled being dirty, the relationship was subverted and reversed. What was dirty was clean, and what was clean was dirty.

He then introduced the Bersih movement into the storyline.

It is the civil society in Malaysia which now sees the government as dirty, and that civil society is stepping up to the pedestal, and beginning talking down to the government, as the government did previously. The civil society wants to clean up the corrupt government. Thus explains the evolution of the concept ”cleanliness” up to contemporary time.

Again, the evolution of cleanlinessis too convenient for me. Again, like I wrote earlier, I find the looser hypothesis more attractive, a hypothesis that traces the evolution of the relationship between the governed and the governing rather than that of a concept, which has to be loosen up beyond its typical meaning before it could fit Farish’s narrative.

Categories
Liberty

[2376] Suaram, a blind believer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The way Suaram reasoned its position on drinking and smoking ban shocked me.

According to the group’s coordinator, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not explicitly mention the consumption of alcohol and tobacco as a human right but it does mention detention without trial is a violation. Because of that, Suaram supports drinking and smoking ban if the majority supports it. And because of the Declaration as well, the group does not support detention without trial.[1]

For a group that fancies itself as a human rights group, I expect more than an appeal to the Declaration. Any serious human rights group needs to have a more developed view on rights. Several Pakatan Rakyat politicians who are also members of Suaram have rightly condemned the group’s view as being simplistic.[2] (Now, I am aware that these politicians may be inconsistent with their views with regards to what I am about to share but let us ignore that at the moment for I want to focus on Suaram).

Suaram’s view will not stand any liberal test. Consider this appalling case: if detention without trial was not mentioned in the Declaration, then Suaram would have supported detention without trial. There is no two-way about it. The Declaration is the document of reference for Suaram after all. Or maybe, I should just say that it is the view of the coordinator.

Such is the inadequacy of Suaram or the coordinator’s reasoning.

A more respectable human rights group would have derived its position from the first principle instead.

I want to say this rather forcefully because I think the point on first principle is crucial.

Any libertarian will reject the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rejection is due to the categorization of liberties and rights into negative and positive.

Negative liberties and rights refer to absence of interference by others to a person action that does not necessarily or dangerously affect others (after reading Nozick’s State, Anarchy and Utopia, I have a little bit trouble defining this but you know what I mean). Freedom of expression is part of negative liberties.

Positive liberties and rights refer to obligation by others to aid the person to achieve the person’s positive rights. The supposedly right to employment is an example of negative rights.

Libertarians reject positive liberties. Only negative liberties are accepted and these negative liberties are simply referred to as individual rights. Libertarians, or maybe at least me, understand negative liberties as individual liberties. Because the Declaration contains positive liberties, libertarians reject the Declaration.

This is my first principle: negative liberties. All rights originate from those liberties. Most of my positions are derived from that first principle. And you can see how my position on drinking and smoking come from; it comes from that first principle of negative liberties.

Drinking and smoking ban interferes with individual action as defined above. Hence, libertarians reject the ban, whether or not it is mentioned in the Declaration.

(If there is conflict of rights there, then Coase theorem is there to save the day. If it involves private property, then the owner’s words are supreme.)

But the libertarian view does not matter as much here.  What matters is the first principle. You can see where the libertarian — my — position on drinking and smoking ban is derived from. Suaram lacks such rigorous reasoning.

Another angle demonstrating the inadequacy of Suaram’s view is this: if all liberties and rights are derived from the Declaration as understood by Suaram, then the Declaration is utterly inadequate to function as the document of reference in a liberal society. Many negative liberties simply would not exist and that is an unpalatable scenario for any liberal, and I use the term liberal here in the widest of all sense.

Now, here is something more insidious than naïve thinking.

There are many negative liberties unmentioned by the Declaration. Now, left-leaning individuals and entities claim to embrace a more comprehensive view of liberty. They accept both negative and positive liberties and rights.  The crucial point is that a left-leaning entity accepts negative liberties as well, notwithstanding the areas where positive rights prevail over the negative ones. It is safe to say that any person who confesses belief in liberty however it is defined at least subscribes to negative liberties.

For the negative liberties unmentioned by the Declaration, by deduction, Suaram believes the majority has the power to decide whether a person should be stripped of his or her negative liberty.

The discretionary leeway is despicable for one reason: it is the tyranny of the majority. For a self-proclaimed human rights group to see no wrong in tyranny of the majority, that is shockingly disappointing.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — KUALA LUMPUR, June 7 — A human rights group today will support a ban on alcohol consumption or smoking should the majority of Malaysians favour it.

Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram) said, however, that the Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for detention without trial, was exempt from public opinion.

“The right to drink and the right to smoke is not explicitly spelled out in the UDHR (United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights), but the right to fair trial is,” Suaram coordinator Hasbeemasputra Abu Bakar told The Malaysian Insider today.

In a statement sent last night, Hasbeemasputra said “the state has the responsibility to make laws that regulate society and has a duty to ensure the wellbeing of the people, and gazetting no-smoking zones helps to fulfil these two roles.”

When asked why Suaram now supported the smoking ban in Malacca but opposed the ISA, the human rights activist insisted that the ISA ran contrary to the UDHR. [Boo Su-Lyn. Alcohol, smoking ban if majority wants it, says Suaram. The Malaysian Insider. June 7 2011]

[2] — SHAH ALAM, June 7 — Two members of Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram) rejected today the human rights group’s backing of bans on alcohol consumption or smoking as long as a majority favour it. [Boo Su-Lyn. Pakatan reps slam ”˜simplistic’ Suaram over alcohol, smoking bans. The Malaysian Insider. June 7 2011]

Categories
Liberty Society

[2300] Of living without fear

I feared being alone as a child. One could say I was spoiled.

I remember bugging my parents every time I needed to go the bathroom or the kitchen at night. Activities in the house died down as the night progressed. Both the bathroom and the kitchen were located at the back of the house and both became very dark and very quiet late at night.

Sometimes it was just hard to get them to accompany me, especially when everybody was fast asleep. Whenever I had to go there alone, I would run to the switches and light up the entire house brightly so I could see everything. In my head, there were devils and monsters lurking under the table and behind the cupboard. Somewhere, something was going to get me somehow, when there was no light.

I could not bear the thought of my parents leaving me by myself then. They did exactly that for the first time when I went to kindergarten. It was a tearful experience for me. I cried so badly for at least a week that even the headmistress recognized me. “There he goes again,” I could imagine her saying.

During my late teenage years, I attended a boarding school in Kuala Kangsar. The small royal town is very different and over a hundred miles away from my home city, which was the slick and modern Kuala Lumpur. To me, Kuala Kangsar was rural and it was right in the middle of the jungle. I did not cry but I did feel melancholic for the first couple of months.

There were large trees within the school compound that stirred my already wild imagination. Just outside of my dorm was a swimming pool dating before the Second World War as well as the only Eton Fives court in the country that had fallen into disuse.

The floor of the corridor of the dorm itself was red, supposedly to cover the blood of the victims of the war that could not be washed away despite rigorous scrubbing. Beyond the fence was thick jungle that I dared not look into during the night.

Worst of all, I lived in the middle of a wing and the bathrooms were located at the ends of the wing. The long walk to the bathrooms at night was scary. The horror stories, one which involves a green lady that walks around the school, or flies if you wish, under the full moon, simply did not help matters. Yet, one has to do what one has to do.

I grew up and got over those fears eventually. I later spent slightly over six years of my life abroad in two foreign countries alone, never missing home even one day. I spent a week in the Sierra Nevada, where I once had to camp alone in the Tuolumne Canyon due to some misadventure. And I camped with a group of strangers in the jungle of Endau-Rompin just because it was a fun thing to do.

These so-called achievements are of enormous importance to me. It boosted my confidence to inculcate the independence that I should have, if I was to claim myself a libertarian. It enabled me to do many great things and to live the life I am living right now, which was beyond the grasp of my teenage mind. I have met fantastic people, seen beautiful sights and become part of great institutions, none of which would have occurred if I had stayed meek.

However real those fears were to me, they pale in comparison to others’ fears.

The religious institution in Malaysia recently prosecuted Shiite Muslims. Many Malaysians reacted negatively to a recent confession of a gay Malay. Some have even threatened to hurt him. To escape prosecution and discrimination, they have to hide some aspects of their life. The prejudice of the majority in the society forces these minorities to hide, hence forcing them to live life meekly and in fear.

A friend, journalist Poh Si Teng, produced a documentary on the transsexual community in Malaysia some time back. I helped a little with the production. It was through her and the documentary that I learned that many transsexuals in Malaysia resort to prostitution because they cannot find other jobs. Society in general discriminates against transsexuals so much that they, the transsexuals, have to go to the margins of society and have no other real choice to support themselves.

The Malaysian government — and the society at large — place systematic prosecution and discrimination against these minorities. That exacerbates the issue of equality of opportunity that already exists in the natural state of no government intervention. Some people are prevented by the state and the society at large from having merely a decent life, just because of who they are.

Just imagine for a moment what these minorities can achieve in the absence of their fears? What can they contribute to society?

If I can overcome my silly fears and achieve a lot, I am betting that they can achieve a lot more if only the source of their fears could go away.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

First published in The Malaysian Insider on January 12 2011.

Categories
Economics Politics & government

[2280] Of centrists lose with a viable “third force”

There is talk of a third force in Malaysia. Lawyer and activist Haris Ibrahim has stated that the third force is a bunch of independents ready to co-operate with Pakatan Rakyat. Zaid Ibrahim wants to form a third political party. If in the end, it comes to a third competitive and national political grouping capable of affecting national elections, then I do not think it is the wisest of all moves.

A third party will adversely affect Pakatan Rakyat more than Barisan Nasional, given that members of the so-called third force seem to be those disillusioned liberals. They sided with Pakatan Rakyat in the last general election but that alliance is unraveling. They are disappointed with Pakatan Rakyat due to various reasons.

While liberals, they are liberal in superlative terms instead of being proper liberals who adopt a comprehensive liberal worldview like the classical liberals. Some may even be social liberals, however, noting how Kua Kia Soong has written that the third force has to stand on the left of Pakatan Rakyat, assuming he is part of the so-called third force. But never mind whether they are proper liberals or not. What matters is that these groups disagree with the status quo in the country.

Furthermore, Barisan Nasional, the beneficiary of the status quo, does not have too many liberals within its ranks. The liberals are closer to Pakatan Rakyat than Barisan Nasional, hence any competitive third grouping will compete more against the former rather than the latter. I would be in agreement with Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad about the effect of a third force as defined earlier in encouraging the status quo, i.e. having Barisan Nasional continue to be in power, for better or for worse.

Pakatan Rakyat, however, will not be the only side to lose because of a third force. A system of one-party dominance is bad for centrists because it provides only one choice to centrists. Instead of Sophie’s choice, one faces Hobson’s. In fact, it is worse than that. Regardless of choices, there is only one outcome: more of the same.

Another point on the adverse effect of a third force can be demonstrated through the famed Hotelling-Downs model.

The model is a location game. In a two-party (or two coalition like in Malaysia; it does not matter as long as the parties within the respective group collude) democratic system, both political parties gravitate to the center. This happens because political parties want to win elections and they win it by garnering the most votes. Meanwhile, voters will vote for the party that is closest to them. As a result, a party that sits farther from the center with respect to the other party will get fewer votes than its rival. Both sides know this, sooner or later. Eventually, there is only one solution: sitting at the center is the best winning strategy.

Now, I do not think highly of centrists. More often than not, their positions are inconsistent. It is forged out of convenience rather than conviction. Their positions are a hodgepodge of points assimilated from everywhere, regardless of contradictions. Some centrists are centrists simply because they are apathetic.

Nonetheless, centrists do provide the stability required in a political system. They are the anchor in society. Given that many views are diametrical, centrists would process these views and hold compromised ones instead, if they care at all. Since the Hotelling-Downs model suggests centrist voters — more accurately the median voters — will win, the other side of the coin suggests that a competitive two-party system has the capability of preventing extremists from assuming power.

Unfortunately, this central tendency within the model is weak. The moment the system accommodates a third competitive third party or more, the central tendency weakens, or even disappears. It has been proven under the Hotelling-Downs assumption that there is no equilibrium with three competitive parties or more.

It will always be optimal for parties to change their positions, be it at the center or somewhere else. A party can always do better than the others can until the other parties respond by changing their positions. That in turn encourages the original party in question to change its position to outdo the others. The process will continue on forever.

There is no guarantee that the center position will be taken. There is really no reason why the center position is special anymore. The political centrists cease to be the anchor. Their influence on national politics decreases with respect to extremists. Thus, it is quite possible for extremists to hold power in the end, even if for a short while.

The lack of equilibrium is not necessarily bad, of course. It is an opportunity for diverse political views to prevail. There are many other benefits to having a third competitive party, but breaking the one-party dominant system is not it.

Even so, it is hard to see these liberals switching their positions too much in order to win elections. Their views are ones based on conviction and not convenience. The same cannot be said about Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat. If the Hotelling-Downs model can be used and if the competitive third party is strong enough to affect the election outcome, then this suggests that it will be optimal for Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat to move away from the third party and away from the center.

Again, centrists will lose out.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

First published in The Malaysian Insider on November 24 2010.